No, I still don't want to work for Google

If Google had been the hottest place in the world to work, and I'd been fresh out of university, then maybe.

If you hire lots of, I don't know, compiler specialists but you allocate them to write web apps we're all possibly worse off. The issue is, and what you're not cottoning on to, is that in a company the size of Google there's probably a team working on x for all values of x that could maybe use another member.

They're only tolerant of their resource allocation scheme because they probably don't worry about their employee acquisition cost.

With a company the size of Google, it'd be really interesting to deregulate their internal labour market (i.e. what Valve does). Let people switch all the time! If you need to prioritize one boring, yet necessary team allocate higher salaries to it.

This explains the blind allocation policy. If knowledge that is not At Google doesn't count, then there's no point in matching people with their expertise or interests, because a Noogler by definition doesn't know anything.

In July 2011, I did some research on the strategy of the Google+ Games team and saw that the going plan was doomed to failure and seriously risked such embarrassment as to kill the entire product. (Lots of Zyngarbage, preferential treatment to mainstream publishers.) I had some domain expertise from designing a game and spending a lot of time hanging around game designers. So it was pretty easy for me to come up with a strategy that had a damn good chance of actually succeeding. I posted it internally and got a huge amount of engineer support. The strategy was to establish a quality-centered community first by providing a platform for independent developers, integrate it with Hangouts, and become a center for the "German-style" board game sphere. The high quality starting community would establish G+ Games as cognitively upscale, creating a comparative brand advantage that would persist in perpetuity.

By the way, the Google+ Games engineers also got wind of what I'd been proposing and they supported me. It was as obvious as it can be to humans (obviously, no one can predict the future) that this strategy would work. I got a ridiculous number of emails from engineers telling me that I was right on and that they wished they were implementing "Real Games" instead of giving ridiculous preferential treatment to mainstream publishers (who were throwing us mediocre product because they didn't expect us to succeed). What got me in trouble was that a lot of high-level people didn't like that an FNG had so much engineer support.

I was a recognized domain expert, but not an At Google domain expert. There were no At Google games experts, because Google had never gone into the Games space before (and that's smart, because Google did extremely well on web search by being ideologically non-editorial, but for the games space quality is so damn important that you must be editorial.) So it came down to politics, because Google's At-Google bias rendered it incapable of recognizing domain expertise and discovering a correct decision.

Finally I got an email to the effect of, "domain expertise isn't relevant here, deal with it. Besides, you're only a SWE 3." Well, fuck you very much. I don't see why job titles matter when you're about to lose millions of dollars and would have been making as much had you listened to me.

A year later, I was proven right, but it doesn't matter in the least. Google+ Games is a non-concern, and I'm not a part of Google.

The lesson I learned from that ordeal is not to try to "save" a company from itself because you can't. You'll be seen as right, and possibly even lionized, long after you leave... but it won't matter in the least. Keep your head down, stay employed, and enjoy the middle-row seat to the show-- that "show" being the people in charge making fools of themselves.

Wait, isn't it the shareholders' risk of investing in a company that torches money for no good reason?

Have a bad year, get "underperformed". (I dare anyone to have a long career without having a bad year at some point).

Ding! Now it's really hard to move until you've scorched that badness from your record. Your mission is to get a bunch of good reviews, or get promoted, or find a sympathetic ex-manager who's willing to hire you anyway (this is why you need a network, and one reason why the "patron" mechanism emerged -- the patron model compensates for a broken review system and a bunch of busted policies that surround it).

I've been in the software biz 30+ years and I've had really horrible reviews 3-4 times. It can be devastating if you're in an organization run by robotic principles. [btw, I'm not a bozo. You only have my word for that, I know . . . but I'm not :-) ]

I wish this were true. Certainly, if people were more careful about how they spend their lives, this would be true.

However, you need to consider the average (or even above average) young engineer and how he makes decisions. Sit in a computer lab at a major engineering university and start a conversation with the CS and EE students to see what kind of work they want to do. They have no idea. These kids work themselves raw to get perfect grades in EECS programs that require all-nighters to get the work done, but at the end of the day, they are as confused about The Good Life as anyone.

Most of these kids have had heavy pressure from their families to do well in school, and that same pressure pushes them into a "prestigious" company like Google. Recruiting flyers actually use the word "prestigious" (same for recruiting flyers for the various engineering student groups and fraternities), which I think must be specifically targeted as Asian students' cultural background.

A lot of great minds I have studied with simply shrug when asked what they want to do for a career. Hence Google has its pick.

The truth is that you should usually take the severance as offered, because a lawsuit usually isn't worth the time and reputation risk. That said, there are reasons companies write severance contracts. They're afraid of lawsuits, and secondarily about what you might say about them.

At-will protects the right to end employment for business reasons (layoffs) and to fire people for objective, published performance standards. The first of these, I think, is completely reasonable. The second would be reasonable if the standards were published before people accepted the offer.

Performance improvement plans (PIPs) attempt to make subjective firings look "performance" based, but if you know how to play that endgame, you can draw it out and make your manager's life hell without giving him anything objectively fireable. (You shouldn't make his life hell. In fact, if you can strike a deal with him where he improves your review so you can transfer, and you get the hell out of his way, that's better. You should get a new job and resort to endgame tactics only if you need more time at the old job.)

With a rescinded offer, there's no performance case, so it's only legally acceptable if the company can establish a business-related reason (such as a plant closing or a hiring freeze).

It's very unlikely that one will actually end up in a lawsuit over this. You use the words "promissory estoppel" to get a severance package, and you take it.

Some bastard, and they are not in short supply, who was not a fan of unions or the strengthened bargaining position that they give employees.

See also "right to work" states, where "right to work" means "right to find yourself without work and without recourse".

Google could eventually reach that point....

I wouldn't give anyone a pass if they show no personality, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking with good product intuition during my interview. Vice versa, I don't think any academic geeks would give me a pass if I couldn't solve their math puzzles with a proof.

I could be just talking out of my ass here, but it is nonetheless how I see this situation. I don't like it, but I don't see any evidence of it changing anytime soon.

I truly don't understand someone who claims to be a great talent and not willing to put up with an hour or two if interview on technical topics. He might or might not be a bozo but by such a stance he failed my personal fit test.

In the end, if a team at google in need of my specific skills (cue obligatory Liam Neeson schtick) recruited me, I'd happily go back. I don't expect that to happen, and in fact, the one project that remotely resembled something I'd want to do there got deprecated.

Life goes on...

(I'm another who got dropped into a "poor for me" role. I waited too long to think about transferring. The site director said that I shouldn't have made that mistake. A co-worker on the same team who was in a similar situation at an earlier stage, on my advice, proceeded to begin his transfer immediately. He had a much better experience.)

The real world isn't all that different - if you found a startup, you're likely to go through 3-4 years of nobody giving a shit before everybody suddenly discovers your a genius.

michaelochurch appears to have had a very strongly negative experience with his time at Google - I'd implore you (and everyone) to not base your assessment of what the company is like on his experience alone, especially since I've got pretty much entirely opposite experience.

If you say you will punish failed 20% projects. Nobody is going to buy into a concept where you people are likely to be punished for failing to try and do something good for the company in the spare time.

The point of these programming tasks is not to show off your prowess; most of the time the interviewer is trying understand your thought process and maybe some basic programming abilities. Think of it like a sanity-check.

Showing off turns people off because it can lead to negative team behaviors. Being creative to make life better is good, but there's a line between that and being too clever to work with other people.

Yes, I know some countries are doing better than others and that in some places unemployment is even decreasing, but taking into account the fact that Spain is on the verge of bankruptcy and countries such as France and Italy are being hit by austerity, I see no reason for optimism.

First, it assumes familiarity with golf balls. I have friends who grew up in Manhattan who have never seen a golf ball. They may have seen one on TV, but that doesn't let you really gauge the size of something.

Second, it assumes familiarity with buses, and assumes the interviewer and the interviewee are talking about the same kind of bus. Are we talking about a school bus or a big-city reticulated bus?

Third, it tests skills you're not testing. I live in the city and take the bus all the time, and I don't know whether a bus is 20 feet long or 70 feet long. I'm not good at visually estimating measurements. That might be a skill relevant to a carpenter, but not so much to a programmer. Even if you assume you have the measurements, then you also have to visualize the packing structure of the golf balls. This also tests spatial skills, which are arguably not highly relevant to a programmer.

Brain teasers are generally stupid because they are under formalized. I agree with the poster above. If you want to test logical skills, give someone a section of the logical reasoning section of the LSAT. Those questions were carefully designed to test logical reasoning and to avoid testing other things.

It's an analysis of four things: How an applicant socially responds to ridiculous requests outside their previous experience, and how they handle initiating and architecting a "large" engineering project from a vague request, how mathematically well educated an applicant is, and how wide the knowledge level of the applicant extends (basically a psuedo IQ test, with all the legal risks that implies).

This is vitally important for a handful of positions, but a complete waste of time for most positions, thus silly.

The type of questions that they asked at a math meet never exceeded the knowledge contained in Algebra and Geometry, which I had learned by the end of 9th Grade. Mathletic events were designed this way so all high school students could participate on an equal footing.

So, no, I learned nothing during those additional three years that increased my abilities on the math team. The only thing that increased my abilities on the math team was practicing solving the sort of algebra and geometry math brain teasers that they asked at math meets within very limited time constraints.

There's not a math meet problem that I ever saw at one of those math meets that I couldn't have solved on my own given enough time.

As of this morning, I have sent emails to each of those account holders asking whether or not they have alternate payment methods available, as I will be canceling my Paypal account shortly so as to opt out of their mandatory arbitration clause.

If I choose to accept their mandatory arbitration and continue to use the platform, then that is my choice. That it causes me considerable inconvenience to opt out of their policy is my problem alone. So long as there are other ways to pay, then it isn't Paypal's responsibility to cater to me or my beliefs.

Does this mean that I might have to cancel some accounts (namely PRGMR.com, which I use and love) and replace them with other, perhaps more expensive alternatives? Yes, but that is the choice that I am making regardless.

If G+'s benefits to you are greater than your conviction against their real name policy, then that is the choice that you have made. You're of course entitled to your opinion on it, but nobody's forcing you to use it even if it is perhaps the most convenient way to do what you want.

The reason for this is perhaps anecdotal, but in my personal experience, I generally find richer, deeper and more meaningful discussion when real names are involved.

This is anecdotal at best, and HN is a notable exception to that rule, but that is my experience. If I were president of the world, I would not change Twitter's rules, as that is within their right to provide pseudonymity, but if I were president of Twitter, I might just change it. (Though from a business perspective, what they have has been working for them, and I'm profit-minded enough to wager I wouldn't mess with that.)

I have signed contracts, purchased property and pay utility bills under the former, while the latter is relegated to a very few.

Unrelated, I think this is the first that I realized George Orwell was a pen-name.

Regarding empathy vs. understanding, I'll direct you to another comment[1] I made on the subject, but the TL;DR version is that I believe that I am empathetic to the plight of people who feel they need anonymity, but am not empathetic to the people who feel that they need anonymity and must also have it on Google Plus, despite there being other alternatives available.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713137

In counterpoint, while I understand that these views are public, it is to that degree that I make sure to state them as accurately as I am able. This means that my comments tend to be a little wordier than necessary, but if (as another has suggested) employers were rejecting me from a job based on a comment I made on the internet, then I would view that as better than being hired by a company that would fire me for something I said on the internet.

I am fully aware that neither case is the ideal, just as I am also aware that there are shady companies who perform overzealous background checks. I won't comment on whether those checks are right or wrong except to say that by not hiring me based on the result of an overzealous check is perhaps as much a win for me as it is them.

The pragmatist in me says that because passing on the left is often legal, surely they have some way to identify that, or at least accept it as a deviation from the mean which they would discard.

The cynic in me though believes it exactly as you suggested, that every time you break the speed limit gets added as a 'point' against your record, and enough points eventually causes your premiums to go up.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713137

Free speech may well be 'whatever you want to say', but I might often say things that I don't mean. I also might say inflammatory things that I regret. I also might say things that are insensitive to others, or are completely horrible to all people, depending on my mood. I believe that with the freedom to say 'anything' I want, I also have the responsibility to say the things that are meaningful and, at least to the ability that I can ensure, accurate.

When I mentioned filtering on things I should say, I meant that while I believe I have the right to say whatever I like, I don't feel I should make those same remarks over the internet. Just as I believe I have the right to make racist jokes, I would not personally want to be held accountable as being a racist, so I would not. If I did, I would not make them on a megaphone at a racial harmony rally. If I did, I would expect to be held accountable. While I would not expect to be the victim of violence, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I did.

In summation, I understand that 'free speech' is not limited to 'free speech with accountability', I believe as a personal choice for myself and nobody else, that it should be. I believe the old trope goes something like "Live your life as though your mother is watching everything you do" is one that I try to live by. It isn't one that I insist upon others, and I don't want my mother peering into the bedroom often enough, but I believe that accountability adds a fair amount to controversial discussions and makes them far more relevant.

Had Martin Luther King, Jr been 'anonymous' and preached with a V mask, I don't believe we'd have made anywhere near the progress we have on racial equality. That doesn't mean that I require all others to relinquish their anonymity/pseudonymity, but I prefer it personally and I find it to be a good choice for others to make.

Thanks for the attempt at clarification.

It has nothing to do with whether or not it affects me personally -- it obviously does, but whether I agree or disagree with the choice being made here. I happen to agree, and as such, I use G+ (if only rarely). You disagree, so you don't. I assume that nobody is completely friendless or in complete isolation from their friends/family/colleagues because of their decision to not use Google Plus. A social network is not vital, and even if it were, there are plenty of others to choose from. If your friends aren't on that social network, then you don't get the benefit of it, but that's true of anywhere.

Insisting that Google abide your choice is the sucker's bet in my opinion. For what it's worth, almost every social network excludes somebody. In this case, it is 'people who aren't willing to use their real names', in other cases it might be 'people who are spamming the server' or 'people who are preaching hate crimes' or 'child molesters' or 'people outside of America'. An application has policies that it abides. You happen to disagree with one of their policies, and it apparently matters to you a great deal. You can complain as loudly as you like, and you can certainly hope that Google changes their minds, and you can even hold it against them that they don't. That doesn't make what they're doing wrong in any way other than something you disagree with.

(Note -- I didn't mean to intentionally lump any of the categories of people used in network exclusions together, except to come up with examples of why somebody might exclude somebody.)

The problem, in the past couple years, is that it became a place where if you have an unethical manager, you're just screwed. He'll burn you before you can serve your 18 months and get away. But it seems pretty clear that if you get a good manager, Google is a pretty great place to work.

A lot of problems come from when nooglers expect the world to do their bidding, but have nothing to show for it. At the end of the day, profit matters, lines of code matter, cleaning up and maintaining code matter, how much you help your coworkers matter, these things lead to you creating new features, these things matter and increase profitability, but you wouldn't know which new shit to add if you didn't earn your licks. Do your job, then improve things around you while doing your job, then we talk.

Before I came to google, I was very successful, making kick ass fast, scalable systems, doing the job of many people, bringing glory to my managers but not to me.. Didn't matter though because for years I studied coding from what I would call masters, taking my licks, being humble and learning from anyone and anything. I didn't mention my past to my new team members at google.. Some of them ridiculed me at the first site of any minor bug I introduced, but inside I laughed like an insane hobo. The years of shit code I have refactored, bugs that drove me insane because they had to be fixed and no one else wanted or could tackle them.. I endured, so with a silent knowing I set out to rip apart the hearts of my naysayers with a blood curdling smile.

Now I'm being promoted while those who ridiculed me are not, they in fact respect me and head my advice, usually because when they don't, they get ridiculed when their code is the source of design problems.

What you did before google matters, not in how much you boast about it, but in that it gives you the skills to rise above the rest. Otherwise, you're just a blowhard talking about the olden' days that no one gives a shit about.

In that way, I have found that google is a meritocracy, with people challenging each other, making everyone better, and it's something I never got at a previous employer. Before google, employers just took advantage of me. So, yeah, I would defend google to the death and recommend it to anyone who isn't a whining wimp.

The only thing on the line is reputation and people don't like to be "spammed" unless they ask for it.

So that they don't write blog posts like the one we are commenting on? So they don't actively try to convince other (possibly talented) potential employees to ignore your recruiting efforts?

The entire comments section here seems to be "is Google a horrible company to work for and does Google+ suck, or are they merely ok?" If you're looking for new talent, wouldn't you rather have prospective employees asking "is Google a fantastic company to work for or an outstanding company to work for?"

In a situation with former employees, you have to take into account all that has happened with them. Because the employee sure will (for better or worse).

If you have different groups operating for hiring, they need tools and info to work better. I'm not faulting google for this incident, I just think it could be done better.